1) I'm reading a book called Beware Invisible Cows, about the universe basically. There's a chapter in it that struck me. Here's part of it.
"Your reflection is no longer you. You have always already moved on by the time you come to look at yourself, almost as if the mirror has taken a picture of you as you once were. I am exaggerating, up to a point, but the difference between you, as you are now, and you, as the mirror represents you, is measurable.
"The reflection is your younger you. This is what you used to look like, a short time ago. And when I say 'short,' I mean: very short indeed."
..."To see the past it is only necessary to hold the mirror far enough away from the object. Space is not just proportionate to time, space is time. The further we go through space, or simply see into space, the further back in time we travel."
..."We are born, we live, we die: we have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But looked at from a cosmological perspective, not only do we never die, but from certain points of view, we are still not even born. We are born again and again as we pass through new galaxies, and we will die too just as often, only to be born again, and then die. Eternal recurrence is unavoidable. This is not so much reincarnation as us repeating our errors endlessly. We have endless opportunities to start afresh and yet we keep on going down the same path, for ever. We keep on making the same mistakes, for ever. Be careful what you do: your actions will be visible for all time to faraway eyes. Do you seriously think you are going to get away with mugging that old lady and stealing her handbag? Even if terrestrial police fail to apprehend you, whole nations, planets, morally revolted multitudes will be reviling your name for eternity. On the other hand, one good deed and you could be a hero in a galaxy far, far away. Nothing is hidden. There are no secrets. Everything can be seen and known. Everything."
We are eternal simply for the fact that there is light. This chapter in this book totally rocked my world, and made me think a lot about light. Light is being radiated throughout the universe, and it is bouncing off things and bending and doing all sorts of weird stuff. Eventually it will reach Earth, and we'll be able to see our universe because of it. Because of the speed of light, or the cosmic speed limit, some light that is really really old and really really far away hasn't reached us yet. And some light has reached us, but in the time it took to reach us, the body emitting it has aged millions of years. We are essentially looking into the past when we look at celestial objects many light years away.
Anyways, enough with the science rant. The reason this book and this thought relate to the light project is pretty obvious: Light is responsible for basically everything we see. And there's also a lag. I want to somehow demonstrate this duality of light as giving us info, but also giving us the wrong info. I don't know exactly how I want to do it. I don't want to photograph an object deceivingly with light, but I want to show how light deceives. If that makes sense.
2) I used to play video games a lot. I immediately thought of Splinter Cell as we were discussing the light project. Wikipedia describes it like this:
"Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is a series of award-winning action-adventure stealth video games, the first of which was released in 2002, and their tie-in novels. The protagonist, Sam Fisher, is a highly-trained agent of a fictional black-ops sub-division within the NSA, dubbed "Third Echelon." The player controls Fisher, who usually has the iconic trifocal goggles at his disposal, to overcome his adversaries in levels based on Unreal engines that were extended to emphasize light and darkness as gameplay elements..."
I remember a lot of different scenes in which night vision was used, and it made the whole game have an eerie feeling. As I was walking home that day, I kept thinking about lighting, and how it can change mood. Walking down Lambton is creepy at midnight when you encounter just a few other people, but imagine if you saw it in night vision. It would be 1000x scarier.
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